Wednesday, May 30, 2012

I wanted to be sure to make a very quick post with the Big Book Award’s 2012 short(er) list before heading off tomorrow for BookExpo America and lots of ReadRussia events… three of the writers on the short list will be in New York:
Vladimir Makanin, Zakhar Prilepin, and Andrei Rubanov. Two books—those by Nosov
and Stepnova—are also NatsBest finalists, and Eltang’s book has already won an award
from Russian Prize. I don’t know much about the other books on the list other
than Prilepin’s, which I’m reading, so am most certainly lacking in nuance for
translating the titles!

Maria Galina:Медведки (Mole-Crickets)

Daniil Granin:Мой лейтенант… (My Lieutenant…)

Aleksandr Grigorenko:Мэбэт.История человека тайги (Mebet.
The Story of a Person from the Taiga)

Vladimir Gubailovsky:Учитель цинизма (The Teacher of Cynicism)

Andrei Dmitriev:Крестьянин и тинейджер (The Peasant and the Teenager)

Aleksandr Kabakov,
Evgenii Popov:Аксёнов (Aksyonov)

Vladimir Makanin:Две сестры и Кандинский (Two Sisters and Kandinsky)

Sergei Nosov:Франсуаза, или Путь к леднику (Françoise, Or the Way to the Glacier)

Monday, May 28, 2012

Back at last: it’s been quite a month of May! This week I
have quick—and rather awkward, since their genres aren’t my usual reading—summaries
of books by two writers who will be in New York soon for Read Russia and BookExpo America events, plus aging news
on two awards, plus a bit about upcoming posts…

First the books... Andrei
Astvatsaturov’s Люди
в голом(People
in the Nude), labelled a novel, is a book of what I’d call vignettes—some
feel especially essayistic and/or autobiographical—that Astvatsaturov links with
the motif of nudity, psychological and physical. I only read Part One, which I loved
for its humorously biting accounts of childhood and its absurdities. Little Andrei
Astvatsaturov, for example, isn’t allowed to use a local swimming pool because he
talks with a friend, though the pool lady tells his mother it’s because he’s
not strong and athletic enough. The friend who lent me People
in the Nude especially liked a passage where Andrei and another friend
communicate, wordlessly, during a field trip to a Lenin museum: the friend
moves his shoulder and mouths “хрусть,
хрусть” (“crack, crack”), referencing their interest in skeletons, which
arose out of some poetry, drawing, and the idea of skeletons climbing the
stairs to Lenin… trust us, it’s funnier and more wonderful than I can make it
sound here. (I Googled because I was curious to see if anyone else liked that passage:
it’s quoted here in Власть.)

Economical communication is Astvatsaturov’s strength as a
writer, too: his portrayals of being a kid—playing at home alone, say, and
taking a phone message—are brief but feel richly (arche)typical, with a
combination of could-be-anywhere themes plus details, like involving imported
beer cans in play, that feel distinctly Soviet-era. I gave the home alone dialogue
to my first-year Russian students: the language was simple enough that they
could read and enjoy some real Russian. (Bonus: They loved the book’s cover!)
I’ll read Part Two later, if I can renew my book loan… it feels different from childhood, beginning with
reflections on writing then moving on to a scene where a literary “dama,”
smoking a cigarette, tells Andrei, “У вас не проза, Аствацатуров... а огрызки из отрывок” (literally
“You don’t have prose, Astvatsaturov… but bits of excerpts.”) True enough, but
his blend of invention and apparent autobiography were funny enough that I laughed out loud. Many times.

Reading Sergei Shargunov’s Книга
без фотографий(A Book Without Photographs) immediately after People in the Nude certainly emphasized stylistic
differences: where Astvatsaturov’s leisurely descriptions blend real life and
invention, Shargunov composes a terser, more straightforward memoir that methodically
barrels through episodes in his life, linking them through photographs and
photography. Shargunov also covers childhood and young adulthood, beginning as the
child of a priest and not joining the Pioneers, then winning the Debut Prize,
becoming a political activist, and visiting political hot spots, including
Chechnya, as a journalist. I thought the quick pace suited the material well, given
Shargunov’s writings about politics, including the October 1993 Events, his
attempt at elected office, and mentions of where he’s not allowed to
photograph. A Book Without Photographs
reads easily, as a perceptive personal history of the late Soviet and early
post-Soviet eras. I enjoyed Shargunov’s combination of toughness and honesty,
which—again!—contrasts with Astvatsaturov, whose book also feels very honest, though
People in the Nude has more of a
feel of irony and vulnerability than toughness.

Rossica Awards. Better late than never on this information! Academia Rossica
announced last week that John Elsworth won the 2012 Rossica Translation Prize
for his translation of Andrei Bely’s Petersburg,
and Gregory Afinogenov won the Rossica Young Translators Award for his
translation of excerpts of Viktor Pelevin’s S.N.U.F.F. Congratulations to both.

What’s Coming Next:
A guest post from Olga Bukhina about books for children and teenagers written
by writers who usually write for adults. Her post is especially topical since
two of the writers she chose—Dmitry Bykov
and Boris
Minaev—will be in New York next week. Award information: the Big Book short
list is coming very soon, and the National Bestseller winner will be announced on
June 3. Then Zakhar Prilepin’s Black
Monkey. I’ll be in New York for a week, attending Read Russia
events and BookExpo America… let
me know if you’ll be there, too!

Sunday, May 6, 2012

With BookExpo
America—which has a big, huge Russia focus this year—coming up in about four
weeks, I’m focusing my reading on BEA writers for the next month or so. Today’s
post, about Andrey Rubanov’s Жизнь удалась(All That Glitters), is the first of a series
of pieces about books by writers who will be at BEA.

A brief point of information before I get to Rubanov: The Russian
global market forum at BEA is just one part of a bigger program, Read Russia 2012, which includes a slew of events in New York open to
the public, an expo of books and art for children, and a documentary on contemporary
Russian writers. As I’ve mentioned before, I am (disclosure!, disclosure!) very
happily working away on projects for Read Russia and will be at BEA, which I
love every year… meaning I am beyond excited for this year’s fair. An
intensifier for all that excitement: an anthology of Russian stories will
include two of my translations, plus some of my favorite writers, including
Margarita Khemlin and Vladimir Makanin, will be coming to New York for BEA.

So! On to Mr. Rubanov’s
book, known as All That Glitters on his
agent’s Web site. What I
found most interesting about Rubanov’s novel—which covers the disappearance and
subsequent finding of a Moscow wine salesman named Matvei Matveevich Matveev—is
Rubanov’s mixture of two genres: social novel and detective novel. Matveev disappears
after saying goodbye to his loyal wife, Marina, at the beginning of the book,
and Rubanov interweaves numerous characters’ timelines, establishing MMM’s
rise from aimless youth to a member of the upper-middle class who falls very
ill after visiting two men who promise to forgive his rather substantial debt.

Rubanov also offers histories of the men MMM goes to see:
a retired hockey player who goes on to head up an NGO for retired athletes and
his evil sidekick, a prickly former doctor known as Kaktus. He works in
a police detective, too, a hardboiled lone wolf, Svinets, (“lead,” as in Pb), whom
Marina hires to find MMM. This is a lot of main characters, but I thought
Rubanov managed them and his supporting characters efficiently, showing, for example,
how MMM and Kaktus crossed paths in high school—old jealousies run horribly deep
here—and revealing back stories in a way that combines suspense with (almost)
plodding detail.

I thought Rubanov did even better on the social side, describing
the Moscow nineties with mentions of the MMM pyramid
scheme, which interplays well with Matveev’s name, crooked nonprofit
organizations, and the idea that qualities like decisiveness and
stick-to-itiveness were more important in that era than education. He also
notes the October
Events of 1993; Matveev keeps a distance, as he did in 1991.

Another most interesting thing about All That Glitters is its kitsch element, something I noticed even
before I read that Rubanov himself called the book “чистый кич” (“pure kitsch”). I think it was
MMM’s focus on a happy orange sky, a motif in the book that sounds suspiciously
like the bright future of socialist realism, that tipped me off early in the
book. Plus characters using the title words, which, in dialogue, might sound
more like “life is good” or “the good life.” Then there’s the removal of the
pads on one character’s fingers (this has some icky consequences), the
hardboiled cop’s tractor-driving brother outside Moscow, and all those searches
for empty lives with lucre that (as we know) can’t buy happiness. Of course the novel
wouldn’t have been complete without a stripper. Or Svinets having to watch the
same TV channel as the neighbors, who live beyond a thin wall, so he can feel
like he has his own space.

The final most interesting thing about All That Glitters is that it works fairly well as a slow-burn thriller
with lively language and a strong social element that generates sadness, humor,
and irony. Despite being a little overloaded with information and back story in
many spots, with Rubanov’s take on Moscow in the nineties and the choice of hockey (which I love) instead of, say, soccer or basketball, All That Glitters managed
to keep me well-entertained even when my head was cloudy from a cold.

Level for non-native readers
of Russian: 2.5-3.0/5.0. Not especially difficult, though there is some
slang. I loved seeing the word мебеля
in print!

Disclosures: I am
working on projects for Read Russia. And I look forward to seeing Julia Goumen,
of Goumen&Smirnova Literary Agency, at BEA next month. I also hope to hear
Andrey Rubanov speak. He is, by the way, a great admirer of Varlam Shalamov.

Up Next: Andrei
Astvatsaturov’s Люди в голом(People in the Nude). Then other BEA
writers: Sergei Shargunov and Yuz Aleshkovsky.